Given that Petrarch is second only to Shakespeare as the most widely translated Renaissance writer, and that his Canzoniere contains many of world’s greatest and most popular love poems, it might seem redundant to add yet another translation to the stacks.  But A.M. Juster’s new translation is notable not only for its masterful handling of the poetry but for his choice from the Canzoniere’s 366 poems of the 24 poems he has titled Longing for Laura.
            Any translation, even prose, is difficult, because there is rarely a true one-to-one correspondence between a word and its equivalent in another language.  Much is lost when the original language uses allusion, pun, or any kind of verbal strategy that invests the word with more than its literal value.  Poetry is impossible to translate in any absolute sense because of its heavy use of word play and symbolism, its sculpted compression, and the musical textures used to charge the sensuousness of its imagery.
            Formal poetry is even more constrained, especially the sonnet, with its strictures of 14 lines, iambic pentameter, and specific rhyme scheme.  Because of the limited number of rhymes in the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet, it is the most difficult of all forms to translate into English.  Add to that the need to update the vernacular and idiom of one era into that of another and it is clear that any translator of Petrarch is forced to make compromises.
            The choices are to give as literal a translation as possible, without regard to form, or to “write” a formal poem as close to the original poem as possible.  Juster has chosen the latter.  As Professor Samuel Maio assures us in the book’s introduction, Juster’s translations of the sonnets (the predominant form in the Canzoniere and in Longing for Laura) “remain true to the Italian and true to Petrarch’s abbaabba rhyme scheme.  Even more remarkable, Juster does so in a modern idiom that preserves the integrity and flavor of the Petrarchan original….Juster translates with a poet’s ear for the sonic beauty of language.”

            The reader of a translation must make compromises, too, but Juster asks us to make very few, and all are justified.  I would certainly not complain, for example, that he compresses elements, or that a phrase rendered closer to the original could end the first poem with “what thrills us in the world is but a brief dream” instead of Juster’s version, which ends, a bit less poetically, “what thrills / us in the world is but a dream that’s brief.”  Translation that remains this true to the sense while maintaining the iambic pentameter and preserving the rhyme is a formidable task that when well accomplished the reader could easily take for granted.
            At least as important as Juster’s faithful translations of the individual poems is his assemblage into this sequence, which creates a narrative that cuts to the quick of Petrarch’s emotional and spiritual agony.  Central to the sequence’s tension is the unresolved mystery of paradox and its metaphysical implications.
            Love is the core paradox that binds the narrative together.  The youthful, proudly “virtuous” Petrarch suddenly finds himself stricken with love — or rather lust — for “Laura,” the beautiful, spiritual, and married (and therefore unattainable) Laurette de Noves, whom Petrarch first met in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon in 1327.  For over thirty years Petrarch suffered from his unrequited love for her, for twenty years during her life, for ten years following her death.  In these poems he clearly recognizes that it is her righteousness that has rejected him, yet he cannot, in his words, help but feel that his songs (poems) of lust should humble her abrasive, violent heart.  She is his sweet yet bitter adversary whose gaze has transfixed him, who has enchained his heart, whose light sears and destroys him.  Her rejection of him that keeps him innocent is the source of his guilt.  Through his prayers for her mercy he has lost the light.  Her hardness has turned him into living stone.  Spent by her whom he has never had, he is trapped between the living and the dead.  He cries for death and the “clearer sight of someone better not to see.”   He knows that in spite of all the power she has over him, she is not really in control; she is a “phantom guide,” whose brilliance gives his heart a “sharper view,” a clearer understanding of the ways of the heart, even though his eyes are veiled with despair so he is deprived of the light (either her, or the grace of freedom from her) he pursues.  Paradox breeding paradox gives birth to these poems.
            In poem 2, Love is identified as God, who punishes countless crimes “with grace,” and at the same time is personified as Cupid (Eros), who takes out his bow “like an assassin marking time and place.”  Agape and Eros collude as well as collide at the point where Petrarch becomes helplessly obsessed with Laura.  His fall is so immediate that Love does not even have time to ready his weapons for battle.  Nor can Love free Petrarch from the “butchery” that his single arrow has inflicted, nor help his victim find “higher ground,” the grace from this brutal version of “grace.” 
            Even Love can’t solve Petrarch’s dilemma; his fate is sealed.  Even Love can’t rescue Petrarch from love; not even grace can rescue him from the punishments of grace.